Saturday 19 September 2009 19.08 EDT
First published on Saturday 19 September 2009 19.08 EDT

Eight days ago, a 32-year-old France Télécom worker died after throwing herself from the fifth-floor window of company premises in Paris following news of further corporate reorganisation.

The suicide, the 23rd among staff at the former phone monopoly in 18 months, triggered anguish about stress at work. Didier Lombard, the company's chairman, was summoned to a meeting with Employment Minister Xavier Darcos and efforts to provide psychological support to employees during restructuring were stepped up at companies across the land.

The sense of workplace stress when you cross the threshold of a French office or factory doesn't seem notably greater than anywhere else in Europe in these difficult times. But in asides and emails, employees frequently complain about how over-loaded they are.

Hervé Juvin, president of strategic management advisory firm Eurogroup Institute and a respected social analyst, suggests that the problem lies not so much in workplaces, but in how the French regard work. Surveys consistently suggest that they are happy about their own lives, but alarmed about the wider world. "When it comes to their family, their homes, their friends, all is fine," he says. "But beyond that, they see the world at large as hostile."

French transport infrastructure and medical services are the envy of the world, the countryside is spacious and beautiful, Paris remains an architectural jewel, and there is an ample social safety net for those who lose their jobs or suffer illness.

Yet there is a collective fear that these anchors are all coming adrift, that the services available today will decline in the future. And that fear is not without foundation. The state deficit is forecast to reach almost 74% of GDP. The social security and healthcare overdraft limit has just been doubled to €20bn (£18bn), and endless media stories talk of service quality being eroded as the overblown state seeks to shed jobs and enhance public sector efficiency.

Stéphane Rozès, a political analyst and president of study firm Cap, says: "The French say that now they are happy, but when you ask them about the future they are pessimistic. They feel they are not in control of their destiny. For the past 15 years, the French have been convinced that tomorrow will be worse than today. They want to conserve the present."

This helps explain why work looms so large in perceptions of self-worth. Juvin says that staff "cling to the company, which is their last point of outside certainty in an uncertain world".

The vehemence of French reactions to site closures and restructuring this year is rooted in this desperate struggle to balk change. Factory occupations and boss-nappings have been commonplace. Ministers swarm to try to avert job losses and save doomed plants. When HIG Capital, an American private equity firm, agreed to invest €1m to save just 50 jobs at the troubled Molex car parts plant near Toulouse, the announcement was made personally by industry minister Christian Estrosi.

"There is a widespread perception that the state should guarantee jobs for life and rising incomes," says Juvin. As the state pares the civil service, ministers play to the gallery, leaning on companies, sometimes strong-arming potential investors, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with employees to produce an adapted version of the status quo.

The French crave security, and the private sector no longer provides it. Three-quarters of parents want their children to get safe state jobs. Every year, 800,000 candidates compete for 60,000 public sector posts.

Graduates of elite colleges expected to join an executive élite this autumn, but now find themselves as low-paid, insecure interns. There are more than 20 types of employment contract, but more and more employees – particularly the young and unskilled – are signed on short-term rather than indefinite contracts that offer full employment protection.

Meantime, the 35-hour week, still nominally in force in some companies, increased time off in exchange for flexibility that benefits employers. Factory workers can find themselves working split shifts, or accountants protracted days during the company reporting season, increasing pressure on family life. In effect, staff are obliged to do as much work, in less time. Hence the stress.

Middle-class employees "thought they had a deal with their employers", says Juvin. "If I give a lot to the company, the company will give a lot to me." Restructuring and job-shedding have shredded the contract.

Often reluctantly, workers have become highly mobile. A report to the Conseil d'Orientation pour l'Emploi last week showed that in 2005 a quarter of French people had previously worked outside the region where they now work, against an EU average of 15%. Because around half of households rent, the French can relocate far more readily than their UK counterparts in search of work or the good life.

Unemployment at the end of June reached 9.1% – 2.6 million – in mainland France, up from little more than 7% in the first quarter of 2008. But according to the accompanying quarterly survey from the national statistics institute, the number of people wanting work was actually 3.3 million.

The pervading sense of insecurity and job scarcity prompts saving. While British and American consumers hocked themselves up to the hilt with mortgages and credit card debt in the boom years, the French continued to save almost €15 for every €100 earned.

All this helps to explain why the dream of many French families remains enshrined in the 1995 film Le Bonheur est dans le pré, in which a harassed factory owner flees a northern industrial town to raise geese in the south-west. He finds happiness gazing over the meadow, companionship in the village café on market days, and professional fulfilment modernising the farm's production of foie gras.

But France cannot run away from globalisation, live on peasant-style craft production, or count the value of happiness derived from gazing at meadows. To become happy, Juvin believes, the French need to abandon the idea that the state should solve all problems. Rozès says they need to work together, locally, to shape their future. Both agree French workers need to regain the sense that they are in control of their destiny. How would you measure that?